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I do reviews of Doctor Who from 1963 to present, plus spin-offs. As well as this I do non-Doctor Who related reviews of Grimm, The Walking Dead, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dollhouse, Blake's 7, The Crown, Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, Sherlock, Firefly, Daredevil and many more.
There are also reviews of more than 400 films.

Tuesday, 1 January 2013

The Illusionist (2006)

“Everything you have seen here has
been an illusion.”

This is the first time I’ve seen
this film, but I well remember the awkwardness of its coming out at much the
same time as The Prestige, which
slightly overshadowed it and was largely seen as the better of the two films
about Victorian magicians with massive twists. That’s a pity. The Illusionist, considered on its own
merits, is a fine film.

The film is set in a
semi-historical Vienna of 1900, in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian
empire, and has an interesting political subtext. The villain, Crown Prince
Leopold, is fictional (although the emperor is clearly Franz Josef) and at the
head of a disturbingly hierarchical class system with the Habsburg monarchy at
its apex. The emperor is far more than a figurehead, and the snobbery of the
system is seen in various ways- Eisenheim’s romance with the Duchess Von
Teschen is star-crossed and forbidden, while Chief Inspector Uhl is limited in
his career paths through being far too common to advance much further,
especially given the further handicap of his integrity; Paul Giamatti is
outstanding.

And yet the Habsburgs are the glue
that holds this multi-ethnic empire together, protecting it from the dangers of
nationalism and ethnic conflict which would plague this area throughout the
Twentieth Century, from the Holocaust to the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia. The
empire is archaic and moribund, but the future without the Habsburgs is
ominous. Another slight theme is the association of the Crown Prince with
rationalism and empiricism and Eisenheim with Madame Blavatsky style spiritualism.
This is a little uncomfortable for the sceptics among us, but heigh-ho.

The film centres mainly around an
audacious, brilliant and twisty-turny plot with a still, dignified, mysterious
hero in Eisenheim (Edward Norton gives an undemonstrative performance but this
seems appropriate), a truly unpleasant villain in the Crown Prince (a suitably
slimy Rufus Sewell). I shall try to avoid spoilers, but the plotting is
glorious and the ending truly satisfying.

The direction, from Neil Burger,
is also impressive. I admire the colours in particular, with the sepia element
to the opening titles and the pre-Raphaelite look to the flashbacks contrasting
with the realism of the “present”. It’s a mystery why the largely American cast
should feel the need to adopt vaguely British accents for characters who would
have been speaking German, a rather odd Hollywood habit, but otherwise I can
find little to pick at. The score, from none other than Philip Glass himself, is also superb.

As far as I can recall this isn’t
quite up there with The Prestige. But
it deserves better than to be unfavourably compared to a slightly better film. The Illusionist is a superb film in its
own right.